


The Cure For Insomnia

by Nitrobot



Category: Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2015)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Sleeping Together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 19:07:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9003946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nitrobot/pseuds/Nitrobot
Summary: Grimlock would more likely kill a mech than tell him that he has trouble sleeping. Which is probably why he goes to a femme for help one chilly winter night.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pagemistress1](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pagemistress1/gifts).



> Request for Page-Mistress on tumblr, who wanted some Strongarm/Grimlock fluff. I'm usually more of a Strongswipe girl but it was interesting figuring out what might end up bringing these two together.  
> (Special thanks to flyingcondors for her ideas about Grimlock's past and for beta reading)

Over time, Strongarm had gotten used to the noises in the night. The distant lullaby lilt of a bird off somewhere in its nest, the crackle from rusty leaves scraping against each other in the creeping whistle of wind that seemed to come and go with the Earth’s warmth. Russell called the experience ‘winter’. Even though she shivered in her berth awoke with frozen joints, Strongarm called it ‘peace’.

But, similar to Cybertron’s veterans, she might not have enjoyed it so much if she realised sooner how easily it lowered her guard, and how the slightest crunch of dirt outside could startle her into pulling her gun out.

“Who's there?” The blue burn of her rifle almost drowned out the yellow optics blinking meekly down the barrel, so that even with her guest’s towering height she didn't recognise him until he answered.

“Uh...just me. Grimlock.” He waved an empty hand as she tilted the gun down, as if to prove he didn't have a bullet to send through her helm while she slept. Where most Cons were concerned that still wouldn't have convinced her, but she'd had long enough to decide that he wasn't a Con anymore. 

“Oh… sorry.”

As she decisively holstered her weapon, Grimlock tilted his helm with crooked denta poking over his uncertain frown. “Should be me who's sayin’ that. Didn't mean to scare ya’-”

“I wasn't scared, I was just…” Strongarm was left stalled as her vocaliser failed to keep up with reflex denial. Only her frame was any use to her, and with it she sat back down on her berth with a shake of her helm. “What do you want?”

Still standing listlessly in the doorway of her own corner of the scrapyard, Grimlock looked as if he was trying to remember just that. It was only when he craned his neck around enough to see how dark it was outside that he came back to his dull senses.  
“...Can't recharge.”

To that, Strongarm could only scoff despite how his claws wove together in embarrassment under his low stare. “Says the guy who has no problem falling asleep on a pile of nails?”

“That's only during the day!” he excused, no doubt remembering the rude awakening he got in the form of a bucket of icy water for slacking off. “At night, I… I dunno, it's just a lot harder. No matter how tired I am.” 

And Strongarm only just noticed it when her optics adjusted to the frosty gloom; how his limp servos dragged his shoulders down, how his whole frame seemed to rebel against itself as it tried to stay upright. Most worrying of all was his optics as they flickered, so dim they almost completely blended with the shadows, turning him into nothing more than a listless statue.

“Does Bumblebee know about this?” she asked, trying not to think of how long Grimlock had been putting up with this, every night as sleepless as the last. No wonder he got restless during the day if he was working so hard to stay awake. 

Grimlock’s frame seemed to shudder, some kind of mechanism to stop his processor freezing, and it took him another moment to realise he had an answer to give. “Pit no.” He snorted a flurry of cold air at the thought. “He'd probably… do somethin’ ta my head, force me into shutdown. I'd rather never sleep than not know when I'm gonna wake up, y’know?”

Strongarm could hardly doubt that, especially coming from a mech who’d spent so long locked in stasis on Alchemor; and she could hardly send him slinking back to his own place with good reason, or with a clear conscience. But she wasn't a medic or a therapist who knew how to help a Decepticon. She was just a soldier, and a friend. All she could offer was somewhere else to rest.

“Alright. Make yourself comfortable.” She shifted herself to the other side of her berth, leaving an empty space just big enough for Grimlock if he curled himself up. She faced the wall, expecting to feel everything sink beneath her from Grimlock's weight, but the lurch never came.

“You're fine with me… being in ya berth?” he asked, as if it should have been awkward for both of them. Strongarm turned back towards him, noting the unease under his exhaustion with some confusion. If anything, _she_ should have been concerned about having a Con so close to her… any Con that wasn't him, at least.

“I'm not forcing you on the floor, Grim,” she said, patting the space next to her again as she rolled back onto her side. “You don't snore, do you?” 

“I'll, uh… try not ta.”

“Thanks.”

To Grimlock’s credit, he eased himself onto the berth so that Strongarm hardly registered how his weight sank into it. And despite his trek across the scrapyard in the cold wind his back burned against hers, a surprising jolt of warmth up her spinal strut. As it spread across her numb digits and protoform, it was very hard not to relax completely against him.

“Didn't used ta be this cold, did it?” Grimlock asked with a shiver, completely oblivious that Strongarm didn't even feel the chill anymore.

“No. Russell explained it to me once, it gets colder as the stellar cycle ends. Something to do with the planet’s rotation.” Her voice felt sluggish with weariness, each word almost eclipsed by a content yawn, but she still remembered the seasons Russell had laid out for her. They'd landed in summer, when warmth like Grimlock's drenched every day and the sun burned itself into the Earth. Maybe Grimlock had absorbed some of it, stored it away until now. Strongarm couldn't imagine another reason for him being so warm against her.

Grimlock seemed to muse over her brief explanation, despite how unlikely it was that he even understood it. “No one on Cybertron never had to worry ‘bout any of that… always warm ‘n cozy near the forges.” He sighed to himself at the memory, wrapping himself in it as he curled up tighter. Even with how he compressed himself Strongarm was still pinned against the wall, though strangely she didn't mind the close quarters.

“Do you miss Cybertron, Grimlock?” she asked.

“...I dunno,” he said after a long pause. “Parts I miss, parts I'm happy without. Kinda like other bots…” There was a creak that might have been his neck angling his heavy helm towards her. “What ‘bout you, Strongarm? You get homesick?”

Even if she was fully functioning, Strongarm would have struggled to answer in any simple way. There _was_ no simple answer, none that she was happy with. If this was how Grimlock thought in his own exhaustion, maybe he wasn't as dumb as she thought. 

“During the first vorn here… I thought I'd lose my fragging mind,” she finally revealed through closed optics. “I’d grown up on stories about Earth, my dad bragging about all the Cons he’d left to scrap in the dirt, but seeing it all for myself, it's so… _weird_. No molten rivers, no skyways or starscrapers. Grass and dirt and leaves… no matter how much water gets on them, they don't rust.”

“And not a damn good thing ta eat anywhere,” Grimlock added in a grumble that was either his vocaliser or permanently half-full tanks. Even though Strongarm lamented their meagre energon rations just as much as him, she couldn't stop a snort of laughter bubbling up at his impeccable timing.

“Yeah, anyone bigger than you would be gnawing their own armour off in a decacycle...I like being here, though. Feeling like I'm making a difference to the universe here. I like the humans. I like my team-”

“Even me?” Grimlock interrupted.

Strongarm’s optics flipped open again, mostly in surprise. It was a strange question from someone you were sharing sleeping space with, but they were both as tired as each other. “Of course, Grim. Why wouldn't I?”

“Ya mean other than the big ol’ Decepticon badge here?” he asked, with an audible scrape of his claw across the damning emblem on his shoulder. Strongarm didn't quite understand his logic until she remembered what kind of Decepticon he was; a regretful one, even if it was just to keep himself alive and free for now. Her sire had always said the only good Con was a dead one… but he also thought he could’ve taken on Megatron with a servo bolted behind his back. Nowadays she was very careful in choosing what to believe from his mouth.

“Yet you're hanging around with Autobots and kicking other Cons to the curb,” she said to him. “A badge doesn't mean anything if you're not working for it. Like back on Cybertron; a police officer can have a badge, but that doesn't make them a good officer.”

She felt Grimlock shrug against her. “I guess… never had much luck with cops.”

Obviously not, if he’d ended up on the Alchemor. When she asked Fixit for some background on him, in those hectic early days of being stranded, he'd only said “property damage”. Something as innocuous as wrecking a building wouldn't land a bot in an offworld prison ship. 

Taking in a deep, cold intake, Strongarm hoped he was groggy enough to speak without thinking (assuming he ever did think). “What did they arrest you for?”

Grimlock tensed, his warmth fleeting so slightly, and Strongarm braced herself just in case. 

“...You never heard?” was all he asked. 

Now Strongarm tensed, suddenly fearing that Grimlock was much more dangerous than she'd first thought. 

“I… haven't been an officer for very long, even before ending up here,” she admitted. An officer as young as her wasn't allowed to pry into prisoner records without at least two approvals from two different and equally sour justice chiefs. 

Even without knowing that, Grimlock seemed to accept it. “If ya really wanna know, I...uh, might’a leveled Nuon City... got a lil’ too cranky one day.”

At first Strongarm thought she’d misheard, or that he'd just misspoken. But she tuned her audios, confirmed what he'd said and was still left confused. “Nuon City? I thought Underbite _ate_ it all-”

“He only ate the rubble I left behind, _and_ took all the glory for it,” Grimlock corrected with a snort. “Didn’t even thank me for the free meal. Figures.”

That explained why Strongarm had never heard of his crime before, if it was kept out of Cybertron’s media circus that surrounded the barren land where Nuon City once stood proudly. “Well, uh… good job?” she said hesitantly, craning her neck just enough to catch a glint of Grimlock's denta as he smirked.

“Not many officers would say that. But thanks.”

Strongarm couldn't help seeing those denta tearing through foundations as she turned back to her spot, but also couldn't help hearing a hint of regret in Grimlock's gratitude. Maybe he was just too tired to try hiding it. 

“Sorry if I'm keeping you awake, bein’ here n’ buggin’ you,” he mumbled after some uneasy silence, one that almost tricked Strongarm into believing he'd lulled himself by now. “Haven't had a chance to talk this much with someone listenin’ in a long while.”

“It's fine. Talking keeps us both warm.” She mostly said that to cover up for how close she kept herself to him. “And I can't imagine Decepticons making very good company.”

“Never had any Con friends on Cybertron,” Grimlock admitted. “Just other Dinobots.”

Again Strongarm was brought out of her daze with a jolt of shock. “ _Other_ Dinobots?” She knew that was what Grimlock called himself, but she'd never heard of anyone else like him. Whether or not that was good or bad was something she couldn't decide on.

He must have noticed her sudden tensing as he rolled onto his back, leaving Strongarm leaning against his servo for warmth. “Long story, but let's just say I got used to being asleep for a long time… there was me, Snarl, Sludge, Slag and Swoop.” She could almost hear his smile as he named them. “All of us woke up together… stuck in some kinda lab. Not a damn hint’a why ta share between us. So we just walked, as far away as we could manage. Never knew how long we were walkin’ for… only that by the time we got anywhere, no one was around. Not even a Scraplet ta annoy us… we’d walked into an entire planet left abandoned.”

The emptiness of his voice gave a clear enough image of it, such an immense void that there was only one thing he could have been talking about.

“The Exodus…” Strongarm could hardly whisper it. The only bots that she'd known where around to see it for themselves never liked to talk about it, not Bumblebee or even her own sire. Grimlock must have been one of the last bots left on Cybertron when they were all gone… 

“You don't look that old,” she said. To her relief, Grimlock laughed hard enough to make his engines cough. Strongarm could still hear them lurching against the berth as he went on.

“Probably cause we weren't alone for long. I remember seein’ this… beam of light in the sky one day. The only kind of light I'd seen for cycles. I didn't know what I was, what planet I was even on. Pit, I don’t even know much now, but somehow… I knew what that light was. Like seein’ stars for the first time, y’know?”

“Yeah... I think I do.” Strongarm had grown up around the stars, after all. If he was talking about what she thought, Optimus activating the Omega Lock, then he'd watched their home being saved from the brink of extinction. “What was it like?” 

Grimlock stared with bright optics up at the ceiling, at the bare patches of sky above them. “Like watchin’ time, or Unicron or whatever, keel over and just give up. One klick you're standin’ on a pile of rubble, the next you're in the shadow of a building, a city, a whole other world that wasn't there before...” He answered like a hiss from his vents, certainly not like something the slow mech she thought she'd known would say.

“Sounds terrifying,” she said, in response to a lot of things that night.

“It was, at first,” Grimlock admitted. “For the others mostly. I wanted to go the light, but they were scared. Wouldn't go with me. So I promised them… I'd go alone. I'd find out who we were, and I'd bring ‘em back.”

Strongarm watched his faceplate twist into something almost unrecognisable, his age showing through the cracks, only for the illusion to shatter with a sad smile he tilted towards her. “Obviously, didn't end well.... by the time I found anyone else, all they saw was the badge on my shoulder. Didn't even know what it meant at the time, until someone called me… ‘filthy Decepticon scum’.” He was too used to the phrase to say it with any venom, but the way he threw himself back onto his side told Strongarm everything else he wasn't saying. 

“Only so much of that a mech can take without any answers, from … guess that's why I snapped. I used to wanna find others like my own, y’know. But… not much point when you're the only one around.” His frame was a furnace, but his voice was made from ice, brittle and cold. He was too weary to be properly angry, but Strongarm knew the rage was simmering somewhere in his spark. 

“Where are the other Dinobots now?” she asked. 

“...I don't know,” he whispered back. His face was hidden, but his anguish was draped across his shoulders. Strongarm wanted to touch them, to add to the lonely warmth he'd huddled around himself, anything to take that burden from him. Anything to help the poor guy sleep.  
But all she had to offer were more questions.

“That's why you can’t sleep, isn't it? Cause you worry about them?” she whispered, not expecting much of an answer. Grimlock, the ancient mech she hadn't known a thing about until now, stayed silent and still, ignoring her for the first time, leaving her wishing she'd followed suit. Her free hand drifted, almost giving into the urge to feel him properly, just to get a reaction or assurance that he was alright…

Only for her servo to snap backwards in shock from the colossal snarl that belched out from his olfactories. Her entire berth shook from the force of the sound, and the long whistle that followed it almost rivalled the winter wind outside.

Left cramped on her side once again, Strongarm sighed and pulled her servos over her audios. “So much for trying _not_ to snore, huh big guy?”


End file.
